Ireland’s Good Soldier Švejk reaches Prague

All the characters in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s great Irish-language comic
novel Cré na Cille are dead. The title could be translated as Graveyard
Clay and the setting is a graveyard in Connemara. But this is a graveyard
where the deceased are more than a little talkative. The book is narrated
in many voices, most of them in South Connemara dialect, and has been said
to be untranslatable into English, let alone Czech, but now, nearly 70
years after it was first published in Ireland, Cré na Cille has just come
out in a vibrant Czech translation. David Vaughan talks to the translator
Radvan Markus.

Radvan Markus, photo: David Vaughan
I first met Radvan Markus at an event at the Irish Embassy in Prague to
mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising. He was reading extracts from
a couple of Irish language short stories, and when I spoke to him
afterwards I soon realised that Radvan was steeped not only in Irish
literature but also the language itself. He is currently teaching Irish at
the Charles University in Prague and has just finished the epic task of
translating Cré na Cille. Before talking about the book itself, I asked
Radvan how his love affair with Ireland began.

“It happened quite a long time ago in the mid-90s, and the original
impulse came from the music. I was still at secondary school and I came
across some cassettes of Irish bands, and I really enjoyed that. I started
listening to them and eventually started playing the music myself. I also
got the chance to visit the country. That led to a widening of my interest,
from music to the culture in general – language and literature.”

It’s one thing to be interested in Irish literature and Irish music.
It’s quite another thing to become a university lecturer in Irish and
Irish literature. That’s quite a leap. How did it happen?

“I finished my secondary school studies and started to study English at
the university. Fortunately there were some Irish courses on offer, so I
went to Irish classes. At that time I also started translating from the
language, which was a great help as it forced me to engage deeply with the
language. Eventually I got the chance to attend some summer courses in
Ireland, which was of tremendous importance for me. I got the chance to
teach the language both in Prague and in Olomouc. And I also embarked on a
PhD project, which involved reading Irish language texts.”

We’re here to talk primarily about your translation of an Irish classic
by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, first published in 1949. The title is Cré na
Cille, which means something like graveyard dust or graveyard clay. In
Czech you’ve translated it as hřbitovní hlína…

“… At the same time there is a different meaning to the word
‘hlína‘, meaning clay in Czech, and that is ‘fun’. It was very
useful – a gift from above – for the translator, because Cré na Cille,
apart from being a great modernist novel, is also a comic masterpiece.”

Tell us something about the book.

Photo: Argo
“There are two most important facts that should be mentioned at the
beginning. The book is all direct speech, but you don’t know who is
speaking at a particular time, and all the speakers are dead and buried in
the same graveyard in South Connemara in the west of Ireland. Through the
speech of the characters – their conversations – two main stories
emerge: the enmity of two sisters, Caitriona and Neil who is still alive.
The book opens with Caitriona waking up in the cemetery and finding out
that she is neither in heaven nor hell, but in this liminal place. And
there is another plotline, if we can call it that, which concerns the
jealousy of the local teacher, the Big Master, of his widow, who eventually
marries another man. So, these are the main stories, but there’s much
more in the book. There are various themes of conversation that the corpses
have, which have quite a broad range – from local gossip, like the
dishonesty of the local shopkeeper, to topics such as the Second World War,
which is quite important because it is set in 1941.”

At the same time, because they are all dead and buried in the cemetery,
it’s a novel in which nothing actually happens. It’s a novel about
talking.

“You’re right. Talk is tremendously important in the novel because
it’s the only option left to the characters. They cannot move, they
cannot act, but they can achieve things with words. Also, differences in
the use of language, various registers, are of great importance.”

Each person has their own status, their own class, their own oddities,
little ticks, things that they repeat all the time…

“Terms of speech. And, as I said, there’s no other way to distinguish
between the various characters, apart from looking at their use of
language.”

Which brings us to the enormous difficulty of translating the book.

“I suppose one should start with the basic register that forms the bulk
of the book, and this is based on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s own dialect of
Irish in South Connemara. In essence, the translator into Czech has three
options. One of them would be to choose some dialect of the Czech or
Moravian countryside, to preserve the rural flavour. But this would be very
problematic because it would just transfer the novel into a completely
different context. Very simply put, a Czech or Moravian village is nothing
like an Irish village. The next option would be to use standard Czech, but
it would be way too formal for rendering the earthy speech of the
characters. But, fortunately there is one more register in Czech, which is
called ‘common Czech’ and this is the result of the natural development
of the language. This is what I opted for, because at the same time it is
sufficiently informal, but it is not a dialect. It is spoken in quite a
wide geographic region.”

A second problem is all the local colour in the book. The book has so many
different levels and references, direct or indirect, to Irish literature,
history, folk legend. It’s very hard to get that across in Czech.

Photo: Yale University Press
“That’s true, but on the other hand it’s only the details that are
culturally specific. If you look at the novel as such, it actually
addresses themes which are common to western civilisation as a whole. I
would say the characters are quite universal types. What helps also is the
humour. You don’t really need the connotations to have a good laugh.”

There have been comparisons made between Máirtín Ó Cadhain and one of
the great Czech classics, The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk by
Jaroslav Hašek. Would you agree with that and did you draw from Hašek as
you were translating?

“I would agree with that. Of course, we shouldn’t look for any
similarities in the plot or setting of the two novels. That’s different,
but on the deeper level, yes. Both novels use a demotic, earthy language to
poke fun at various authorities and institutions. Both books abound in
elaborate terms of abuse. Also, both novels were compared by prominent
critics to the work of the French Renaissance author, François Rabelais,
which is in my view a valid comparison. It is also interesting that The
Good Soldier Švejk is one of the first books in Czech literature to use
common Czech deliberately for literary purposes. Also, if my translation
sounds a little bit like Švejk, there is a historical precedent to it, and
this is connected with the Irish writer and journalist, Breandán Ó
hEithir, who sustained a lifetime interest in Central European culture.
Both Cré na Cille and The Good Soldier Švejk were on the list of his
favourite books. In 1986, a short time before his death, he even made an
Irish-language radio adaptation of The Good Soldier Švejk. When listening
to it, one can’t avoid the impression that he deliberately used the kind
of language which he knew from Cré na Cille. So, letting myself be
influenced by Švejk while translating the novel amounted to continuing in
an established tradition.”

Let’s now hear a short extract from the book, first in Irish, then in
Czech, then in the English translation by Alan Titley.

“First I’ll explain the context of this particular passage. I was
talking about the second plotline, about the schoolteacher and his
jealousy. This is a long list of curses directed at the postman, who
eventually marries the teacher’s widow…”

I hope he lies and never rises! I hope he gets the thirty-seven diseases of
the Ark! I hope all his tubes get glutted and his bung hole stuffed! That
he gets a club foot and a twisted gut! The Ulster flies! The yellow
bellies! The plague of Lazarus! Job’s jitters! Swine snots! Lock arse!
Drippy disease, flatulent farts, wobbly warbles, wriggly wireworm, slanty
eyes, and the shitty scutters! May he get the death rattle of Slimwaist Big
Bum! The decrepit diseases of the Hag of Beare! May he be blinded without a
glimmer and be gouged like Oisín after that! The Itch of the Women of the
Prophet! His knees explode! His rump redden with rubenescence! Be lanced by
lice!.. .

“It’s one of the greatest pleasures, when one can invent these things
in the target language!”

And you were just telling me that you have the German translation of the
book, which has some rather wonderful oaths in it too…

“I found out when browsing the German translation that at certain points
the curses and terms of abuse are exactly the same as I use myself, because
some of the curses in Czech come from German.”

Remarkably, given that this is a classic of Irish literature, it’s only
just been published in English translation. I think there are two published
translations, one from 2015 and one from 2016. Now it has appeared in
Czech, and the German translation is also quite recent. How important is
this book in the context of 20th century Irish literature and why has it
taken so long for it to be discovered internationally?

“Máirtín Ó Cadhain has been considered the greatest Irish language
prose writer ever since the publication of Cré na Cille in 1949 but being
recognised as a classic did not necessarily mean that people would read it,
because there were obstacles in their way. It is not enough to have
excellent Irish to enjoy Máirtín Ó Cadhain to the full. One needs to
know his native dialect well. That meant that the book tended to be enjoyed
more in other forms. There were several dramatic adaptations. There was
even a film made in 2007 that was quite successful. But you’re right. The
situation internationally only started to change with the publication of
the two English translations.”

And all this is nearly fifty years after his death…

“But it really seems now that he is gradually being recognised as one of
the major 20th century European writers.”

Where do you go from here?

“I’m thinking of one shorter text by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, which has
also been translated into English and German. This is called The Key. It is
a satirical text about a bureaucrat who gets locked in his office and
breaks the key. He can’t escape and actually dies before he can cut
through all the red tape in order to be released.”